Not darkness, for that implies an understanding of light. Not silence, for that suggests a familiarity with sound. Not loneliness, for that requires knowledge of others. But still, faintly, so tenuous that if it were any less it wouldnt exist at all: awareness. Nothing more than that. Just awarenessa vague, ethereal sense of being. Being . . . but not becoming. No marking of time, no past or futureonly an endless, featureless now, and, just barely there in that boundless moment, inchoate and raw, the dawning of perception . . .
